When a Solaris server is overloaded, this is one way to check what actual memory each process is using. Here I am restricting the checks to one user (“steve”) but by omitting the “-u steve” flag to ps, the whole system will be checked.

Wow, it’s been nearly two months since I last made a post about the upcoming book on shell scripting. I’m really sorry, I had intended to give much more real-time updates here. The book focusses on GNU/Linux and the Bash shell in particular, but it does cover the other environments too – Solaris, Bourne Shell, as well as mentions for ksh, zsh, *BSD and the rest of the Unix family.

In terms of page count, it is currently 89% finished. There is still the proof-reading to be done, and whatever delivery details the publishers need to deal with, so the availability date of some time in August is still on schedule. I notice that http://amzn.com/1118024486 is already offering a massive discount on the cover price; I have no idea what that is about, I’m trying not to take offence – they can’t have dismissed the book already as I have not quite finished writing it yet! So hopefully you can get a bargain while it’s cheap.

The subject matter has the potential to be quite boring if presented as a list of tedious system administration tasks, so I have tried to make it light and fun whenever I can; it’s still with Legal at the moment, but I hope to have a Space Invaders clone written entirely in the shell published in the book. People don’t tend to see the Shell as being capable of doing anything interactive at all, so it is nice to write a playable interactive game in the shell. The main problem in terms of playability is in working out how much to slow it down, and at what stage! Of course, being a shell script, you can tweak the starting value, the level at which it speeds up, and anything else about the gameplay. If the game doesn’t make it in to the book, I’ll post it here anyway, and will welcome your contributions on gameplay.

Other than games, I’ve got recipes for init scripts, conditional execution, translating scripts into other (human) languages, even writing CGI scripts in the shell. There is coverage of arrays, functions, libraries, process control, wildcards and filename expansion, pipes and pipelines, exec and redirection of input and output; this book aims to cover pretty much all that you need to know about shell scripting without being a tedious list of what the bash shell can do.

There is a status page at http://sgpit.com/book which also has order information; you can pre-order your copy from there.

IBM’s DeveloperWorks has 10 Good Unix Habits, which apply to GNU/Linux at least as much as to Unix.

I would expect that most experienced admins can second-guess the content to 5-7 of these 10 points, just from the title (for example, item 1 is a reference to “mkdir -p”, plus another related syntax available to Bash users). I would be surprised if you knew all ten:

1. Make directory trees in a single swipe.
2. Change the path; do not move the archive.
3. Combine your commands with control operators.
4. Quote variables with caution.
5. Use escape sequences to manage long input.
6. Group your commands together in a list.
7. Use xargs outside of find .
8. Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside.
9. Match certain fields in output, not just lines.
10. Stop piping cats.

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/command-line-tricks-smart-geeks has some useful tricks. A lot of it is presented as being bash-specific, but isn’t. Also, a lot seems Linux-specific, but isn’t. Lots of useful info for all Unix/Linux admins here. These hints go on and on; hardly any of them are the generic stuff you often see on Ubuntu forums, stumbleupon, and so on.

A serious publisher has contacted me about writing a serious book about Linux shell programming.

It is all really very serious. I’m not used to being serious, as you can probably tell from the fact that I have now used the word “serious” four times in this three-sentence post.

I am rather keen to write a book on the subject, not because I’m vain, or desperate for money, but because the stuff I have seen out there in dead-tree format has been of rather low quality. Also because of all the emails I’ve received over the years, they have all been positive, and none has said anything along the lines of “I didn’t need any of that because I bought Book[X]”, or indeed any book. People have emailed me, asking for advice as to what book to buy, and I have been unable to recommend any book that I have seen.

So:
What would you like to see in your ideal book about UNIX / Linux shell scripting, be it Bourne, Bash, ksh, tcsh, zsh, whatever?

Please don’t be timid; if you want to know how to work out how many nose-flutes can be fitted into the area of a Boeing 757, you won’t be anything like as strange as some of the correspondants I’ve had over the years, so please, tell me what is bugging you, what has bugged you, or even what you think might be likely to bug you in days / months / years to come.

I’m likely to answer any specific questions here and now, whether or not they end up in the book, but anything you’d like to see in a book, too… post that here, and I’ll have a stab at it.

Also, I would of course be interested to know if you have found any useful books on or around the subject, and what they did particularly well.